Divers from 21 Special Para Special Forces have recovered a lifeless body from a remote coal mine in the hill district of Assam’s Dima Hasao in the early hours on Wednesday, Chief Minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, said.
The body has been identified as 38-year-old Ganga Bahadur Srestho from eastern Nepal’s Udayapur district, Sarma added.
Earlier on Monday, nine workers, seven from Assam, one from West Bengal and another from Nepal, were trapped in a 300-foot-deep coal mine in the 3 Kilo area in the district’s coal-rich town of Umrangso after the coal mine was suddenly flooded leaving no time for these nine miners to escape to safety.
Of the nine trapped, three miners, including Srestho, were confirmed dead by the district administration after their bodies were found floating in the inundated mining pit. Earlier reports suggested that over 30 miners entered the mining pit on Monday. However, many escaped.
Explaining the reason for the waterlogging of the mine, an NDRF official said that while digging, the miners contacted a water source leading to the flooding of the pit, The Indian Express reported. “There is heavy seepage inside the pit, and because of the depth of the water, it is difficult to assess the actual situation,” the officials said.
Srestho’s body was recovered from a depth of 85 feet after a rescue operation spanning 48 hours by the Indian army, Navy, and Assam Rifles in tandem with both the State and National Disaster Response Force. However, six of the miners remain untraced, and the rescue teams have yet to recover the two bodies as of late evening on January 8, while operations to retrieve them continue. Their chances of survival for the remaining trapped workers remain slim, an unnamed official told PTI.
The rescue operations suffered many setbacks because of the remoteness of the terrain and the frequent flooding of the pit, reaching water levels as high as 100 feet, with rescue personnel being exposed to arsenic water. Efforts are, however, continuing round-the-clock with an expanded team, N. Tiwari, Deputy Commandant of NDRF, told ANI.
Meanwhile, the Navy rushed in a team from Visakhapatnam, consisting of one officer and eleven sailors, including highly trained Clearance Divers with expertise in deep-water diving and recovery missions. The team is fully prepared for this critical and sensitive mission, including deep diving equipment and underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) for search and rescue. Additionally, Sarma, the chief minister, said that “SDRF dewatering pumps have departed for the rescue operation”, and an additional dewatering pump from Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has been “loaded onto an MI-17 helicopter at Kumbhigram, awaiting weather clearance for deployment.”
The mining tragedy has also sparked a political storm in Assam, with the opposition and critics of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in the state and Dima Hasao claiming the state government and the Dima Hasao autonomous council under BJP leader Debolal Gorlosa allowed illegal mining.
“The BJP-led government in Assam has backed about 70 illegal coal mining operations,” said Jagadish Bhuyan, the general secretary of the Assam Jatiya Parishad. “About 2,000 workers are involved in illegal mining in the Umrangso area.”
Sarma too has acknowledged that the Umrangso coal mine is illegal. “Prima facie, it appears to be an illegal mine,” he tweeted. A First Information Report has also been filed against Punish Nunisa, an alleged close aid of Kanika Hojai, wife of BJP leader Gorlosa, in connection with the mishap. “The arrest is merely an eyewash,” former BJP legislator, Samarjit Haflongar from Dima Hasao, said.
A survivor from Nepal told the BBC that “he was working inside a so-called ‘rat-hole’ mine.” Rat-hole mining is a hazardous method that involves digging small tunnels, just large enough for a person to crawl through, to extract coal. The practice was banned by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) in neighbouring Meghalaya in 2014, and the Supreme Court of India later upheld it.
Despite the ban, illegal coal mining has continued in the northeast, including in the eastern hilly parts of Assam, often claiming many lives. In 2028, 15 men were killed in a rat-hole mine in Meghalaya’s Jaintia hills after they were trapped in the coal mine because of flooding. In eastern Assam’s Patkai hills range, three men were killed in another rat-hole mine as recently as in May 2024 following a landslide.
Meanwhile, the opposition has demanded a judicial probe into the legality of the Umrangso mine. They questioned the role of the Assam Mineral Development Corporation in continuing these operations despite a Supreme Court ban on rat-hole mining in 2014.
